Shakespeare’s plays examine the theme of certainty with consummate skill, exploring evil and good, assurance and its absence, intuition and love, evidence and interpretation, and the dialectical methods used to guide moral action.

The first chapter of this important new book establishes the intellectual perspective of sixteenth and seventeenth- century epistemology, emphasizing the paradigm shift in dialectic, the art of logic, that precipitated a crisis of thought among such figures as John Dee, Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon, and Walter Raleigh. The rest of the book discusses fourteen of the plays, beginning with the early comedies, then treating tragedies, history plays, and one problem play in terms of their special approaches to the questions of certainty, showing how Shakespeare breathed life into what might have remained a scholastic debate.

CONTENTS

Preface

I. Introduction: Backgrounds in Logic 1

II. Audience and Illusion: Certainty of Character in The Taming of the Shrew and A Midsummer Night’s Dream 21

III. Certainty and Love at First Sight: The Heart Sees Deeper Than the Eye: Troilus and Cressida and Romeo and Juliet 45